by Randy Shaw on January 30, 2023 (BeyondChron.org)
Seventh and Market
Media Downplays Violence, Threats to Businesses
The San Francisco Chronicle reported last week that a “crowd” stabbed a man at Seventh and Market Streets (“Man has life-threatening wounds after attack by crowd in downtown S.F.,” January 21, 2023). The brief four- paragraph story was one of the paper’s most popular stories for days.
Why did it get so much readership? Perhaps many knew that Seventh and Market is not “downtown.” It’s Mid-Market, where open drug markets between Market and Mission thrive. Many also learned from social media that the “crowd” was roughly thirty deadly drug dealers. The story was really about dealers from a drug cartel who nearly killed someone for getting out of line.
Two days later it was reported that on January 13 four generations of a Central Valley family were killed execution-style by a drug cartel. That story went viral. Yet Leighton Woodhouse and Michael Shellenberger, writing for Public, a Substack publication, were the only local reporters connecting the Central Valley killings to what might already be happening or could soon occur in San Francisco.
Why did other media ignore this connection? Crime is regularly front-page news. Why does San Francisco media resist assessing the threats and ongoing impacts posed to the city by international drug cartels?
Perhaps the media fears accusations of racism. The Public Defender’s office maintains that anti-Latino racism drives attacks on the cartel’s San Francisco operation, which heavily employs Honduran immigrants.
Or maybe the media does not want to scare away more visitors. But it’s too late for that, given how potential tourists learn about the drug markets from hotel web sites and national news coverage.
The SF Chronicle has amply covered the city’s plans to open safe injection sites. But other than Heather Knight, the Chronicle has never seriously assessed why one of the great tourist cities of the world allows drug cartels to freely operate blocks from City Hall.
A Case of Media Denial
Newspaper editors want “new” stories— and open drug markets in San Francisco are not breaking news.
The drug cartel story is also depressing. Editors don’t like depressing stories about addicts that die. Or how the city allows the 300 block of Hyde, 600 block of Eddy, and other areas where families with children live in or near the Tenderloin to be controlled by drug cartels.
Media mention open air drug markets —like their impact on the closure of the Tenderloin’s beloved Piano Fight—-but the crisis does not get front page attention. The Chronicle highlighted a story on drug overdoses in SRO hotels on its website for over a month while virtually ignoring how the easy access to deadly drugs on the sidewalk leads to the deaths of vulnerable people.
Open drug markets also conflict with the larger narrative of the San Francisco Comeback. Tourists and conventions are returning, neighborhood businesses are back to pre-Covid levels, and the city is focused on reviving downtown. That worsening open drug markets could halt this progress—or call it into question—is not a story the local media wants to write.
Many San Francisco reporters and editors don’t support police arresting drug dealers. Many share the Chesa Boudin/Dean Preston/Public Defender view that arrests don’t positively impact the problem. Preston represents the Tenderloin but has never offered a plan to remove open drug markets from the neighborhood without using police.
Media Missing Big Story
I think our local print media—outside Heather Knight!–is missing a big story. But its not too late. The media can still report on the growing numbers across the city calling to close drug markets. The media can still highlight light the savagery and criminality underlying the drug cartel business model now operating in San Francisco.
This past Saturday the owner of a leading Tenderloin restaurant confronted the words “F___You Bitch” on her door: This followed her asking the dealers to stop blocking entry to her business.
I don’t know if the cartels will bring their violence to San Francisco. But the traditional cartel pattern—provide the drugs, not the dealers—has changed. And with profits going through the roof due to lack of city enforcement, nobody should assume more violence in San Francisco is off limits.
Drug cartels are serious business. And our media should be shining a light on them; downplaying their impact in San Francisco will not help them go away.
Randy Shaw
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s latest book is Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. He is the author of four prior books on activism, including The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. He is also the author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco
